Developing an accessibility policy

When you start creating guidelines/policies for your company on accessibility, there are a lot of things to do. First, everyone will need to get on the same page. They need to know why things will be done differently and how. It isn't enough if developers or content creators take accessibility into account if designers and marketing ignore it. Good accessibility requires everyone. And requiring everyone to be able to handle accessibility, the staff will need to be trained.

There are a lot of misconceptions about accessibility. Like accessibility is only for the disabled people or accessibility takes away all the nice things and you end up with ugly designs and boring websites. You can have many nice visual effects and designs just as before. Poor contrast not only affects people with vision impairments but also for example people using older devices. This is one reason you might benefit from raising awareness of accessibility on a more general level.

Think about creating an accessibility team

Depending on the size of your company, it might be a good idea to have a whole team dedicated at least partly to accessibility. The team should get a deeper understanding of accessibility and the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) 2 criteria so they can support the rest of your staff regarding any questions or issues. The accessibility team can also handle staff trainings after they themselves have received training, of course.

At the company I work at, an accessibility team has been created and I am one of three members in the team. We will be responsible for staff training, and we'll be creating our company's accessibility guidelines together with company management. We've mostly studied accessibility on our own, but we recently had the chance to talk with an accessibility specialist and ask him all our questions about the WCAG criteria or accessibility in general. We learned a lot; it was super helpful to have someone teach us. I really recommend providing such an option for your firm's accessibility team, if possible.

Having proper guidelines will help your company maintain a more stable level of accessibility as well as help your workers have a clearer understanding of their responsibilities.

Conformance

The accepted level in many countries is level AA. I think achieving level AA is not too difficult, I would recommend always aiming for it. But make sure you check what the requirements are in your country. It's also good to remember that you don't need to have everything immediately 100% accessible. Set realistic deadlines and, if necessary, tackle accessibility in smaller steps.

And remember, you should also always update your policies and guidelines.

There are a lot of resources on the matter, but here are two good pages I came across while writing this blog post:

• Developing Organizational Policies on Web Accessibility has excellent info on how to develop organizational policies in practice.
• On how to start bringing accessibility up in your company, check out 4 steps to get accessibility on your company’s agenda.

I would also like to remind you that accessibility is about inclusivity, it's really time to stop neglecting people.